FEDERAL IDENTITY MANAGEMENT USING HIERARCHICAL IDENTITYBASED CRYPTOGRAPHY (HIBC)

Abstract

Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo are the forerunners that provide cloud computing services. Recently more and more companies such as Sales force, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace etc. also begin to provide different kinds of cloud computing services for Internet users. But at the same time these services also bring some security problems. Currently the majority of cloud computing systems provide digital identity for users to access their services, this will bring some inconvenience for a hybrid cloud that includes multiple private clouds and/or public clouds. Today most cloud computing system use asymmetric and traditional public key cryptography to provide data security and mutual authentication. Identity-based cryptography has some attraction characteristics that seem to fit well the requirements of cloud computing. In this report, by adopting federated identity management together with hierarchical identity-based cryptography (HIBC), not only the key distribution but also the mutual authentication can be simplified in the cloud.